Hey y'all, welcome to the woods! My name is Garrett Crouch, and I'm a '26 from Edmond, Oklahoma. Besides blogging, I'm involved in Greek Life and Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. I enjoy reading fiction, listening to 90s rock, and playing video games and guitar in my free time. Other than that, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share a bit of my Dartmouth student experience with you—stay a while and enjoy!
For my first term at Dartmouth, I had a lot of fun exploring different courses/areas of study that piqued my interest—EARS 14 is a perfect example. This course in particular was very friendly to new students. I had a lot of fun analyzing the ways in which Earth's weather system works, everything from the tornado and climate labs to black lightning and supercooled ice. Professor Osterberg made the course extremely fascinating and personable! I'm extremely glad I took this course and recommend it to anyone interested in Earth Science.
I had zero programming experience prior to taking this course, and quite honestly, It was a split decision on my part. Nonetheless, I'm extremely glad I took COSC 1, and as a byproduct, I have a newfound love for computers. I came out of the course with a solid foundation in computer science principles as well as programming skills. More importantly, I made my own fully-functioning video game! ; )
I didn’t anticipate this course being all that different from Latin I, but it ended up being a nice surprise. A typical Latin course at Dartmouth involves small class sizes, group work, and the occasional lecture; however, within Latin II, we had opportunities to take a wide variety of field trips and learn more about the history of the Latin language as well as the many people that spoke it. I thoroughly enjoyed stepping outside the sphere of strictly language work (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) and learning more about the history of Latin in Latin II.
Psych 6 is by far my favorite course I've taken at Dartmouth—this course made me decide to pursue the neuroscience major. Whether it was walking out of the Moore Psychology Building with goosebumps down my spine having just seen a human brain in the flesh, or lying in bed rewatching lectures on the cellular mechanisms of long-term memory storage. This course genuinely made me feel like a kid discovering the world again for the first time, I loved it.
I loved this course—it was a fascinating mix of the neuroscience behind addiction as well as a deep dive into every class of drug. What particularly stood out about this course was the ability to connect my undergraduate research lab experience with the concepts I was learning (I'm currently involved in a neuroscience research lab studying psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, so it was fascinating to see the parallels there).
At first, I was worried Cognitive Psychology was going to be a slight rerun of some of the concepts covered in Psych 6: Introduction to Neuroscience, but this class was actually a pleasant surprise. We covered everything from how babies accurately learn their native language so quickly, to how we uniquely store complex, emotional memories as humans. We even covered a unit on everything psychologists know about the problem of consciousness, which was my personal favorite. There’s something alluring (and undeniably meta) about being conscious while learning about how we know nothing about consciousness—a recurring theme in the Brain Sciences!
Instructed by the esteemed Reverend Dr. Randall Balmer, The Sixties was by far my favorite course during my sophomore summer at Dartmouth. As its title suggests, the class was an in-depth historical overview of American history spanning the years 1963–1974. Now, I wouldn’t typically consider myself a history buff, but this course was extremely intriguing. For one, while we explored widely known 1960s American history topics like Watergate and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., we also covered less mainstream subjects such as Freedom Summer and the murder of Medgar Evers. Additionally, as a class, we examined each topic in far greater depth than I had anticipated—the course was structured so that, in each week of the ten-week term, we covered a new year of “The Sixties.”
In 1804-06, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark completed a remarkable odyssey, from St. Louis to the Pacific, and back. They wrote more than one million words, describing the country, and paid particular attention to the Indian nations they met.” This course, taught by Professor Colin Calloway, reminded me time and time again that what I think I know about American history, that is to say, how I think my nation developed, is remarkably untrue—as students of history, we often forget about the first actual inhabitants of this land before it came to be what we know as America, and in that way I would say this course completely changed the way I view the world (a reoccurring theme in Dartmouth courses ;))
As a high school senior, I was very academically driven and career-oriented. I thought getting into a good college was the ultimate driving factor behind a successful life; in order to accomplish my goals, I needed to be the kid who got good grades, test scores, and attended the most prestigious school possible (this may sound familiar to some of you reading right now). In some higher-order abstraction, high school me had firmly decided that prestige equaled inherent goodness, and that was it.
Nowadays, I would argue that my prior expectations of Dartmouth primarily existed within a realm of superficiality. Now that isn't to say working hard in school isn't important, but I believe I got it wrong when choosing what exactly to prioritize when thinking about my future as a college student. I wanted Dartmouth for its label—when applying to medical school in the future (I had wanted to be a physician since high school), I fantasized about having a bolded "Dartmouth College" on my resume. Naively, as a student attending Dartmouth College, I expected to hold supreme status among my non-Ivy League peers.
It may sound painstakingly corny, but I truly believe the allure of this sort of thinking tends to run rampant in high schoolers worldwide nowadays—it's all about the name. Where do you go to school?
While I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to study at an institution like Dartmouth, my perspective on higher education has undergone a significant shift since my high school years. Nowadays, I wholeheartedly believe that it's not about where you go to school, but why you go to school.What keeps you up at night thinking? Is there some subject that's perhaps always inspired you a little more than other subjects? What is totally and entirely absurd to you to the point where you feel as though you must understand everything there is to know about that thing? If this doesn't resonate with you yet or you can't think of anything specifically, don't fret—the main idea of what I'm trying to poke at here is your "why?"
My philosophy on attending college used to be that it was essentially a stepping stone to earning a good income and securing a desirable placement for graduate school. While I believe that's often a lovely byproduct, I no longer define my success in terms of monetary gain. I know I'm extremely privileged to be at Dartmouth and to even be able to make the sort of claim that one should study simply for the sake of studying itself, but I think the general idea points to a larger theme of choosing purpose over prestige. College should be a place where you explore what truly inspires you, not just a means to a predetermined end.
I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately within the context of my own studies—I've been trying to utilize the academic freedom Dartmouth offers to take more classes simply out of curiosity, and I've found a lot of wisdom through doing so.
Ultimately, I wish to posit to you, pre-college students, that the name of an institution shouldn't govern your academic journey. Choosing a college isn't merely about selecting a brand—it's about finding an environment where academic curiosity thrives and learning feels deeply meaningful. My advice is to focus on discovering your genuine interests and pursuing them wholeheartedly; when you find your "why," the "where" will take care of itself.
In my freshman year, I wrote a blog revisiting my decision of attending Dartmouth College. Now that more than a year has passed, I would love to revisit my decision again, with a more realistic lens.
